They All Have Long Grey Beards (Day 321)

“He had a side business,” my mother tells the couple whom we are eating dinner with. “It was Rabbi Trading Cards.”

The couple, whom I’ve known for most of my life and are the parents of my oldest friend, knew immediately what my mother was talking about. I was the only baffled one. So they explained.

Back in the 1980s, this religious Jewish man, who happened to work for my father as an accountant, started a side business making trading cards with pictures of revered rabbis on them. On the back side, like on baseball cards, were statistics about the rabbis.

My friend’s father told me that he once saw them on display at a local store. They all had long grey beards and looked exactly the same to him, but the religious kids collected them and traded them. It was a lot like baseball cards in that some were more valuable than others. Imagine.

When I returned from dinner, I had to Google “Rabbi Cards” because I couldn’t believe that they existed, despite my companions’ insistence that they were real. I came across this article, which tells of how the founder of the Rabbi Cards company went on the TV show “To Tell The Truth” and stumped everyone because nobody knew these cards existed.

I’m a huge fan of mixing things up, spending time with people older and younger than me.

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"FIFTY" is the journal of my 50th year where I muse about what its like to be a woman of a certain age. I write about the chaos of daily life and a ton of other stuff that interests me: arts & culture, food, books, nature, animals, parenting, relationships, self-discovery, and more.